


End Script

by Beastrage



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chapter 5 Spoilers, Game Spoilers, Gen, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 17:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16497086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beastrage/pseuds/Beastrage
Summary: They've played this game a hundred, no a thousand time. But in the end, even heroes get worn out. Henry and his experience in the studio.





	End Script

**Author's Note:**

> For everyone's ever played and enjoyed this game, from start to end. Based on theories I've seen floating around about the game's end, most especially those by SquigglyDigg. My thank you note to the community and to the creators of this fantastic game. The bolded words all belong to the game itself. Everything else is my work. 
> 
> Not all dreams come true or should, but there should at least be hope of a happy ending. Here's mine.

**I  
** **ALWAYS**  
**FALL** ****

 

The first time, Henry falls.  
He falls every time. But the first time is the most terrifying. Just as he’s about to escape the wave of ink flooding after him, he. Drops. The floor, once reassuringly sturdy, disappears right out from underneath his feet.  
He scrabbles through the floors with a fearful desperation. Wet and stained with ink, ink that comes from both strange rivers and strange creatures alike. Much too panicked to listen much to Alice Angel, worried beyond compare when running into Boris.  
Weeps and weeps after killing Boris.  
Calms down just enough to nearly convince Alice to free him from the cell she and Tom keep him in. Fails and runs and runs.  
As fumbling fingers finally push in THE END, stopping the demon just in time, Henry heaves a sigh of relief. Now, it’s finally over.

But it’s not. He opens the door and he walks into a familiar hallway. The Ink Machine awaits him, waiting to be turned on. The monsters of before wait below.  
It’s happening again.  
How?  
Impossible.  
As impossible as cartoon characters coming to life.

**THERE NEVER WAS A CHOICE.**

No matter what he does, no matter how long he delays the upcoming events he knows are coming, they always come in the end.  
He always falls through the floor, after turning the Ink Machine on.  
Sammy always ties him up to offer sacrifice to an uncaring god.  
Alice Angel always demands her due. Demands him to run errands for her.  
Boris...Henry can never save him.  
Alice and Tom always imprison him.  
He always runs from the Ink Demon, only to come face to face with it in the end.  
Armed with THE END. It ends, but it doesn’t.  
Never for long.

**RELIVING THE PAST DOES NOT CHANGE IT.**

He tries each time, with different words and phrases, all mishmashed together, to convince Alice to let him out.  
Before the Ink Demon comes.  
But no matter how close he gets, every time, when it is coming, it’s always useless. All an untrusting Tom has to do is lay a robotic hand on her shoulder and with a single shake of the head, she leaves through the door to their hideaway with Tom close behind.  
She leaves him for dead.

Same with Boris. He spends days upon days with the cartoon wolf, playing all manner of card games and cooking lots of soup. He can leave the moment he recovers from nasty Sammy-given wounds.  
No matter the timing, Alice always awaits them at the bottom of the elevator.  
His heart rises each and every time when he finishes her idiotic self-centered tasks. As the two of them, man and wolf, draw closer to the surface. To safety and freedom.  
Only to fall back down into the pit of his stomach when she once again realizes that Boris, standing next to him, is the perfect Boris. The one she has to have.

(Another sacrifice to her ever-growing ambition. See, Joey, Susie really did learn a lot from you. How to take and take and take, until you were ripping out beating hearts to make your dreams come true, the two of you.  
Crooked empires, made of ink and hearts. Blood and tears. Souls upon countless souls.)

Henry always wakes at the bottom of yet another fall. Just enough to see Boris try to help. Too weak to prevent Alice from taking him.  
From killing him.  
After a few cycles of this, Henry finds it easier to leave when he can. Lessens the heartache afterwards, he’d like to think. But not really. Truth is, he lost the ability to not hurt a long time ago.

**BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.**

The hardest part is, of course, never being able to change what really matters. The second hardest part, right after the first, is how no one remembers anything but him. Alice Angel’s spiel, always the same. TIme after time, she forces him to listen to her nonsense. Completely unaware that her unwilling audience could quote her word for word. Probably knows her speech better than she does herself, the nutcase.  
Alice and Tom never remember that he’s trustworthy, that they could friends, really.  
Sammy always recognizes him too late.  
What’s left of Boris always tries to kill him. And Alice Angel soon after, only to die at the hands of her more whole counterpart.

**ONCE PEOPLE, FALLEN INTO DESPAIR**

When he starts writing on the walls himself, Henry’s not sure. Only that he does it. He doodles and scribbles all sorts of things, from the very hopeful to phrases dripping with despair.  
The words always go away after he restarts, though. Makes it difficult to keep track of what he’s written.  
At least, until Alice shows him her looking glass. A glass that reveals all of the words he’ ever sketched out on the studio walls. Proof that Henry’s not crazy, that time really does repeat. That he’s remembering correctly.  
And for a time, that’s enough. Simply enough, to know what his reality is.  
But that doesn’t last forever.

**WHO IS THE MAN BEHIND THE MONSTER?**

The time when he is simply too tired to do this again comes both sooner and later than he expects.  
It comes as Henry enters the Machine, the lair of the beast that has stalked his every step, over and over again. Waiting for him to kill it and start the story anew.

He closes his eyes. Waiting for the inevitable. For the sounds of a sliding wet transformation, as the creature stretches itself from its mockery of Bendy to a more monstrous form.  
The sounds never come. Instead, something in all of his time here he has never heard before, something new speaks.  
_“Henry.”_  
The man in question opens his eyes. A too wide mouth full of jagged fangs grins back in a familiar crescent smile. A smile that’s haunted him from every corner since Henry first set foot in this cursed studio.  
“You talk.” The words lack any emotion. Just flat, just tired.  
_“Took long while to learn. Henry.”_  
Henry takes a moment to settle the reel a bit more firmly in his lap. “Well, you going to kill me now?”  
The eyeless face that’s more mouth than anything else tilts itself in his direction.  
_“Why? You die, you come back. I die, I come back. Never ends.”_  
His mouth is dry. “Wait, you remember too?”  
A single sloppy nod, flicking ink all over the place. The Ink Demon wiggles the fingers of its gloved hand.  
_“Run, run, run. Chasing but never catch. Catch, but always gets away. Then, THE END.”_ The inky body shivers from pointy ears down to crooked feet at the last two words. Fangs make the chattering sound like the old cartoon sound effect.  
_“But not. THE END doesn’t end. It keeps going.”_  
“Yes,” Henry agrees with a heavy sigh. He leans back in the throne-like chair. “It keeps going.” And going.

_“Who is Joey?”_  
At that, Henry can’t help but laugh. Laugh and laugh until he’s wiping tears from his eyes. Figures. The man who started this entire mess with his hungry greed and inability to take no for an answer, which led to the Ink Demon’s creation in the first place and that same demon doesn’t even know his name. Boy, wouldn’t Joey hate that.  
Irony at its finest.  
“He made you.”  
_“But he didn’t. You did.”_ The demon insists firmly, shaking its head and scattering yet more ink droplets everywhere. _“Henry made Bendy.”_  
Henry shakes his head. “No, I didn’t.”  
_“Yes you did.”_ From somewhere (Henry’s not sure where), the Ink Demon pulls out a small piece of paper. Stained, certainly, but against all odds, still recognizable. A small doodle of a smiling, dancing devil. The first one, if the memories tell him correctly.  
Bendy the Dancing Demon.

“No, that was Henry Stein.” Henry feels his throat close up as he swallows. “I’m just...Henry.”  
Just Henry. Just the shadow of a man who lived, once. A man that worked with Joey, made such an impact on Joey that Joey decided to have another version of that same man running around fixing his mistakes. Forever.  
_“Creator,”_ the demon purrs. The ink making up its form vibrates with an unsettling intensity. It shrinks, until its total size only comes up to Henry’s knee. Then it proceeds to clamber up Henry’s legs, settling itself on his lap. On top of the reel labeled with the ever damning ‘THE END.’  
_“Henry.”_  
Henry, for his part, resists the urge to push the demon off his lap. Instead he sits, allowing the little creature to find a comfortable spot on top of him.  
It’s...warm. Nothing like how he imagined the demon would feel like to the touch. Every ink puddle Henry waded across, was dragged into, always felt so very cold. Chilled him to the bone. A demon formed out of that very same ink would surely feel the same.  
But it didn’t. The chill Henry’s lived with so long, ever since the first fall, slowly dies away. Chased away by the creature cuddling into his chest, nudging at his arms.

_“Henry.”_ Henry looks down at the bared teeth in his direction. The oh so familiar smile seems more like an actual smile than the grimace of fangs he’s been exposed to for so long. Strange to be holding the demon like this, who in a smaller size looks so similar to the cardboard cutouts scattered all around the studio.  
“I don’t want to die.”  
His eyes are wet. He wipes at them with inky fingertips, spreading the blackness even more than it already was, on his skin. “I don’t want to kill you.”  
_“Then don’t.”_ Ah, the simple belief of a child. Like his daughter, after hearing particularly upsetting story, telling him, ‘he’s not really dead, Daddy, he’s just sleeping.’  
Just sleeping.  
They’re all just sleeping.

“I wish it could be that simple.”  
_“Joey...put you here? Put me here?”_  
Henry barely has the strength to nod at that. He’s just so, so tired. Wants lay down forever and never get up again.  
_“Do you...see Joey?”_ The question has an element of...longing to it. Always Joey, everyone wants to see Joey.  
“In between The End and the start. I don’t even know if that’s real, though. Seems more like a memory more than anything. A Henry Stein memory, at that.” Henry scratches at his scalp, spreading yet more ink through his hair. Not sure where the Ink Demon is going with this...  
_“We could win.”_ The little demon bounces in his lap, a mass of jiggling black jelly. _“Could find Joey and stop this, working together.”_  
Almost as suddenly as the excited fit begun, it ends, the demon stilling. It looks at him again, suddenly hesitant. Worried almost, ink dripping off its horns faster than ever.  
_“...could we?”_  
Henry thinks it through. It’s...impossible, really. If there’s anything that Henry’s learned, after what seems like years in this studio, is that Joey always got what he wanted in the end. That Henry never pushed hard enough, never said a no that was able to stick.

But...it’s also impossible to summon demons made of ink, to bring cartoons to life with human souls, to trap that same life in a time loop going on forever.  
“...what if, we went back just one more time?” Henry starts. He rubs at his chin, getting more into it the more he talks about it. “Went back to the start. I let you out, and you help me...”  
We could stop Alice Angel, utterly terrified of the demon she shared her self-declared spiderweb with. We could save Boris and Alice and Tom, all of the Lost Ones. No one would have to be afraid if the Ink Demon wasn’t out to get them.  
Maybe others too, like Sammy who loved Bendy enough to sacrifice people to him or the Projectionist stuck in the dark dark basement.  
They could quite possibly change it all, together. Change their world.  
For the first in long time, Henry feels...hope. A light, a fire, burning in his chest.  
_“Monsters don’t work with heroes.”_  
“But you’re not a monster, are you?” Henry pats the Ink Demon, no, Bendy, on the head. Right between the ears, the horns, whatever those are. “And I’m no hero.”  
_“If from the start...”_  
“Yeah.” Henry looks away. He’s dreamed of killing the Demon once and for all so many times, but there’s something shaming about those thoughts at this point in time. Now that they’ve plotted together and hurt together, that darkness no longer holds the same appeal.  
“I don’t want to kill you.”  
_“That’s okay. I won’t be dead, not for long.”_ A clawed hand pats Henry on the shoulder. The demon slides off his lap onto the floor, stretching out to its biggest shape. A monster form with its oversized hands and horns, grin so very wide and fanged.  
One of those hands picks up the reel still in Henry’s lap and hands it to him.  
_“Do it.”_  
Henry nods back. Feels almost comradely, like two soldiers in the same foxhole together. But that’s what they are, aren’t they? Two soldiers in a war against Joey’s empire. Against Joey’s dreams.  
“See you on the other side. Bendy.”  
Bendy smiles. Really truly manages a smile, even with his mouth really not the right shape for that kind of thing.  
But Henry can tell.  
He takes a breath and puts in THE END.  
Time to fall.  
But this time, they would get back up again. Him and Bendy. Hero and Monster.  
Together.

**WE ALWAYS FALL.**


End file.
